Big Data

EECS faculty members Hari Balakrishnan and Devavrat Shah with EECS graduate students Jonathan Perry, and Amy Ousterhout, and Hans Fugal of Facebook have devised a new system to reduce delay time in data center queues. Using Fastpass, the name given to the new system, the group has experimentally reduced the average queue length of routers by as much as 99.6 percent in a Facebook data center. Read more.

Bernard Haeupler, PhD '13, has been selected by the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) as recipient of the 2014 Doctoral Dissertation Award in Distributed Computing. Dr. Haeupler completed his thesis “Probabilistic Methods for Distributed Information Dissemination” in June 2013 under the co-supervision of Professors Jonathan Kelner, Muriel Médard, and David Karger at MIT.

As the director of MIT’s BigData@CSAIL industry initiative, and the co-director of the more research-focused Intel Science and Technology Center (ISTC) for Big Data, EECS professor and CSAIL principal investigator Sam Madden talks with the MIT News Office about the growing complexity of data. From social networks and images to real time financial transactions, Madden talks about the issues (and opportunities) of what to do with this data. Read more.

Today, March 12, 2014, marks the 25th anniversary of Tim Berners-Lee's proposal for managing general information about accelerators and experiments at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research based in Geneva where Berners-Lee worked at the time as a software engineer. He proposed building a distributed (global) hypertext system which he initially called "Mesh" updating it a year later to the "World Wide Web" as he wrote the code. Read more.

Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory's (CSAIL) Aude Oliva, associate professor of cognitive science at MIT's Brain and Cognitive Sciences working with her CSAIL colleagues including Antonio Torralba, associate professor in MIT's Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department and also a member of in the MIT Computer Vision Group has developed an algorithm to slightly modify a person's face — making it more memorable without altering that person's overall appearance.

Professor Piotr Indyk and members of his group in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) have developed an algorithm that betters his (and Prof. Dina Katabi's) work to develop a faster than fast Fourier Transform in 2012. The new algorithm that uses the minimum possible number of samples to analyze signals has the potential to allow advances in medical devices such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) machines to scan patients.

The Big Data Initiative at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) today announced two new activities aimed at improving the use and management of Big Data. The first is a series of data challenges designed to spur innovation in how people use data to solve problems and make decisions. Read more.

Using artificial intelligence tools including probabilistic graphical models, Ying Liu, EECS graduate student working with Alan Willsky, EECS professor and director of the Laboratory for Information and Decisions Systems (LIDS) has developed a technique that can efficiently infer vital information about the propagation of flight delays at U.S. airports. Liu and Willsky will present their work, which has potential application to a wide range of areas, at the Neural Information Processing Systems Foundation in early December. Read more.